Moodle is an open source course management system (CMS) used by universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, businesses, and even individual instructors to add web technology to their courses. Moodle is currently used by more than 2,000 educational organizations around the world to deliver online courses and to supplement traditional face-to-face courses. Moodle is available for free on the Web (http://www.moodle.org), so anyone can download and install it. Moodle was created by Martin Dougiamas, a computer scientist and educator, who spent time supporting a CMS at a University in Perth, Australia.
The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. Moodler is anyone using Moodle.
A Moodle course connotes web pages that can be explored in any order, courses with live chats among students and teachers, forums where users can air their views and read the views of others, online workshops that enable students to collaborate and evaluate each other's work, directories set aside for students to upload and share their files. All of these features create an active learning environment, full of different kinds of student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction.
Moodle is designed to support a style of learning called Social Constructionist Pedagogy. This style of learning is interactive. The social constructionist philosophy believes that people learn best when they interact with the learning material, construct new material for others, and interact with other students about the material.
To use Moodle, you will need the following:
Moodle installed and configured on a server
A computer with Internet access
A modern browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock etc.
Instructor access to a course on Moodle, or administrator access to the Moodle server.
Introduction
Moodle is an open source course management system (CMS) used by universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, businesses, and even individual instructors to add web technology to their courses. Moodle is currently used by more than 2,000 educational organizations around the world to deliver online courses and to supplement traditional face-to-face courses. Moodle is available for free on the Web (http://www.moodle.org), so anyone can download and install it. Moodle was created by Martin Dougiamas, a computer scientist and educator, who spent time supporting a CMS at a University in Perth, Australia.
The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. Moodler is anyone using Moodle.
A Moodle course connotes web pages that can be explored in any order, courses with live chats among students and teachers, forums where users can air their views and read the views of others, online workshops that enable students to collaborate and evaluate each other's work, directories set aside for students to upload and share their files. All of these features create an active learning environment, full of different kinds of student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction.
Moodle is designed to support a style of learning called Social Constructionist Pedagogy. This style of learning is interactive. The social constructionist philosophy believes that people learn best when they interact with the learning material, construct new material for others, and interact with other students about the material.